Great use of Clojure. Looking at the code, it's mostly a wrapper for an already implemented Java library that computes PageRank. But I feel confident in saying that writing this in just plain Java would have been much more verbose and taken longer.
I've been following programmers that make stuff that I like, and programs that I use. Collectively, the news feed for all these follows have been pretty useful because it's a little bit like a leading indicator on what projects productive people find interesting, so you hear about things a little bit earlier. I found about about _why's Mixico a few days before it was posted here.
I've heard of most of the names top of the list, but #2 was pretty interesting. I had never heard of imbriaco, but it seems like he has just one project: the erlang-textmate. Seems like it's because 37signals follows him, so that gives a lot of juice to his rankings.
Interesting list. At a glance I recognize a lot of ruby people near the top which is a pretty good indicator of how popular git / github have been in that circle. Github has really become the code hosting source for ruby developers. I wonder how popular it is for other languages?
Also, looking at this list is looks like the quickest path to the top is to develop open source software for other programmers. Perhaps a javascript library or a web framework or software used by github itself.
the list the algo generates proves pagerank is a very good.. Google ftw- I do wonder sometimes how they kept the lead now that most search engines are using similar algos..
Back when Google starting gaining popularity it was an order of magnitude better than anything else (I remember using Dogpile to search a dozen individual engines because they were all so crappy).
I feel like the quality of Google search has declined recently, but for something to usurp Google it will need to be an order of magnitude better to get me to switch again.
Honestly theres much more to web search than page rank.
Stemming (run vs running), synonyms, and other linguistic hackery as well as integration/extension with say Maps (its really convenient to be able to search for say "Starbucks Cupertino" for example).
Search is still moving forward, its just so expensive to make a competitive engine and that the room to improve is getting smaller and smaller.
PageRank is only one of the signals Google computes while ranking pages. From what I have heard, they have more than a few hundred different signals they compute - and are constantly iterating on to keep the search quality up.
